India’s Obsession of Pakistan Ignores Elephant in the Room: Occupation of Kashmir

In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack in Kashmir which
resulted in the death of close to fifty Indian military forces, shockingly but
not surprisingly, very little debate over the “blame game” has
ensued.

Instead the mantra that has defined India’s public opinion
has been: “Blame Pakistan”.

As the Indian government began pointing to Pakistan as
“blameworthy” and signalled tough responses, opposition parties,
military spokespeople, analysts and media all rose up agitating for war on its
Muslim neighbour.

Lacking ethics and devoid of integrity, the ghost of the
“Blame Pakistan” movement has begun hovering over public discussion
on the heavy toll of the attack.

The overwhelming notion that grieving families of the
victims want their deaths avenged – and that it has to be shaped by military
action against Pakistan, seems to reflect the national psyche via talk shows,
media reports and the emotional war talk by BJP leaders.

Though dissenting voices are known to have called for calm
accompanied by demands for a thorough investigation into the attack in order to
determine how an impenetrable fortified military base within Indian occupied
territory could be reached by hostile forces, these are on the margins.

Yet what they ask for makes perfect judicial sense. To
discard due process as a nuisance and a hindrance for exacting revenge on
Pakistan is to behave like the colonial settler regime Israel.

India supposedly enjoys the credentials of an independent
state with roots deeply embedded in a freedom struggle against British
colonialism. Yet, seven decades since independence and partition which saw the
emergence of Pakistan, instead of collaborating with each other to deal with
the vestiges of British imperialism, the two countries are on the edge of a new
war.

At the heart of the current impasse remains the Occupation
of Kashmir. Close to a million Indian soldiers, armed to the teeth are deployed
to suffocate Kashmiris. An unbearable situation which inevitably causes
provocation by policies of “shoot to kill” designed in New
Delhi.

The overbearing military presence of troops whose reputation
is sullied by incidents of rape, torture, arbitrary arrest, detention without
trial and mass murder, will certainly be met with resistance.

To imply that legitimate grievances against the Indian
army’s brutal conduct are being manipulated by Pakistan is disingenuous. The
fact is that successive Indian governments from the time of the Congress until
the current incumbent regime led by a rightwing ultranationalist Hindu party,
the BJP, Kashmir’s demands have been suppressed.

These demands are consistent with international conventions
on human rights: remove your army and allow us to exercise our rights as
embodied in UN resolutions on plebiscite.

Instead of complying, India has chosen the Israel-option of
Occupation by brute force. A valueless exercise of futility by any standard.
Yet India persists, believing that if Israel can get away with its policies of
ethnic cleansing while global powers remain muted, so can it.

No surprise then to discover that the military pact India
has with Israel extends to arms trade, training and a common denominator being
a determination to crush resistance under the pretext of the “war on
terror”.

Israeli fascism has joined heads with New Delhi. As in the
case of Palestine where Iran is viewed as an existential threat to Israel, so
too have India’s relations with Pakistan been defined.

A strange anomaly but true nevertheless that instead of
focusing on the elephant in the room – Occupation, India, with the current
emotional impact that the attack has had, has mobilized non-state actors to
clamour for war on Pakistan.

The gung-ho approach of media commentators, regime
spokespersons, opposition parties and military forces make a toxic combination.
It doesn’t augur well for any of the parties: neither India, nor Pakistan.
Except for the military industrial complex which thrives on war.